BUTOH dance avoids the use of mirrors in training. Kasai notes “When you are watching your body in a mirror while dancing, you are not dancing, but you are analyzing the visual stimuli and might be losing the precious/subtle sensations in your body ” . Just like the dancer who intentionally rolls back the eyes, the dancer who watches himself or herself in the mirror diverts attention from alternative resources s/he possess for perceiving the body… the use of mirrors creates an imbalance between an outwardly directed and inwardly directed focus. The mirror seduces the dancer’s focus outside of him/her, leaving the ability to focus inwardly untapped. Watching one’s body in the mirror relies on vision, the sense we tend to exercise most, thereby failing to exercise the dancer’s ability to invoke the perceptual capabilities of other senses, such as the olfactory and auditory capabilities, and especially the tactile.

Every creative rehearsal process aims at finding a balance between the unique ‘appeal’ of the creative act, the possibility to repeat it and recreate it an infinite number of times and to give to the presentation of this act of remembering the quality and presence of the original. As such every dance performance recreates its creation in front of an audience. The movement the dancer makes between his body-memory and his present body is an ‘appeal’ to the spectator to do the same, that is by viewing or sensing the present-a(c)tion, to remember its past, its origin, its meaning.

What is true for the individual dancer, spectator or performance, is also true for the history of dance (or any other art form) which reads as a movement between a ‘a body of memories’ – a tradition and the re-actualisation of this body in the con-temporary, that is ‘being with the time’, ‘being present’.